The VLW Blog

The Virginia State Bar now offers a Web-based form for submitting ethics questions to the VSB Ethics Counsel’s office. Clicking a bright blue button on this page opens the form where attorneys can identify themselves and type in a question for the VSB gurus. The ethics inquiries land in a new e-mail inbox at the [...]

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In an unpublished order, the Supreme Court of Virginia today upholds the 12-month suspension of Norfolk lawyer Curtis Tyrone Brown’s license to practice law. A three-judge panel concluded that Brown made a false statement to a judge and disrupted a judicial proceeding. Brown misrepresented to a Chesapeake Circuit Court judge in front of a jury [...]

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Just as boilerplate complaints will no longer work in federal court, formulaic affirmative defenses may be on the way out as well. Two magistrate judges in Virginia, one in the Eastern District and the other in the Western District, ruled recently that the pleading standards set by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bell Atlantic v. [...]

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Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli says he will donate the $55,000 given to his campaign by the director of a Navy veterans organization that’s under investigation in several states. The donation from Bobby Thompson, whose whereabouts are now unknown, was the second largest individual contribution to Cuccinelli’s campaign, reports The Roanoke Times. Thompson had sought [...]

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On the heels of the ‘Shaggy defense’ comes a drug case out of the Maryland Court of Appeals. Our sister paper, the Daily Record, reports on a recent opinion that peppers in not one, but two, colorful pop culture references. “Reminiscent of a scene from a Cheech & Chong* movie,” Judge Glenn Harrell begins his [...]

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Guy Tower will step down as executive director of the Virginia Bar Association in July 2011 after six years in the post. Tower, who will turn 70 next year, said in a letter to VBA President Steve Busch that he believes “this is an opportune time for transition” for both the association and himself. Tower [...]

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Saying their lawsuit was “legally dead on arrival at the courthouse,” a Patrick County Circuit Court has sanctioned a veterinarian and his lawyer for pursuing a frivolous lawsuit in violation of Virginia Code § 8.01-271.1. Like the Wicked Witch of the East, the lawsuit “was ‘not just merely dead,’” but really “‘most sincerely dead,’” said [...]

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Our sister paper in Phoenix, the Arizona Capitol Times, has been following the controversy over that state’s new immigration law. A federal judge considering the government’s challenge to the Arizona law ruled this morning. ACT Editor Matt Bunk filed this breaking news report: Federal judge strikes down major parts of S1070 PHOENIX–A U.S. District judge [...]

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The Virginia Court of Appeals today rejects constitutional challenges to two convictions, holding in one case that a dying declaration is an exception to the Confrontation Clause and finding in the other an exception to the recent U.S. Supreme Court opinion ruling that the arrest of a driver generally does not authorize the warrantless search [...]

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Privacy advocate B.J. Ostergren, who posted state officials’ Social Security numbers as a dramatic demonstration of security lapses on official websites, won an appellate victory Monday. A 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel affirmed a district court ruling that a Virginia law barring Ostergren’s public postings violated the First Amendment. The 3-judge panel remanded [...]

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